Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Growth vs Retention – AVCIt’s hard to grow if you are churning your users. You might think you have product market fit and so you scale up your hiring, your marketing, your sales, and your capital raising and spending. But if you can’t retain a healthy percentage of your users past ninety days, you don’t have product market fit yet and all the investment you make in your business is just money down the drain. So focus first on retention, then scale.

Josh Elman (Partner at Greylock Partners) Building your growth model and Ladder of Engagement — MediumPurpose: What is the core purpose of the product? Users: Who will care about that core purpose? Inception: How can I get people to hear about this product for this purpose? Adoption: What does someone need to do to get the product to fulfill this purpose for them? Habit: How frequently should the person use the product, and how can we get them to adopt the habit?

David Jackson (Founder, Seeking Alpha) Sustainable growth vs. growth hacking | A Founder’s NotebookMost people think about growth in terms of Acquisition and Activation: “How many signups and activations have we had?” “How can we get more signups and activations?” But they should focus on Retention and Referral: “How can I retain an insanely high percentage of my users?” (= product-market fit); “How can I get them to refer their contacts to my product?” (= virality)

Paul Graham (Co-Founder & Partner at Y Combinator) Default Alive or Default Dead?In practice there is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast it’s usually because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big need straight on.

David Cancel (CEO, Co-Founder at Drift) 3 Warning Signs That Your Product SucksIf you repeatedly hear any of the following comments, chances are you are not solving a critical problem [for your customer]: “If you made your app easier to use I would start using it. ” “I’m really busy right now but I’ll start using your app soon. ” “If your app was cheaper I would start using it. “

David Jackson (Founder, Seeking Alpha) Sustainable growth vs. growth hacking | A Founder’s NotebookIf your growth is all based on hacks, then your growth is a function of how much effort you can keep putting into these hacks. If your growth, which is a derivative of customer base, is itself a function of your customer base, you will grow exponentially. And that growth curve comes without you having to spend money.

Seth Godin (Founder at Yoyodyne Entertainment) Seth’s Blog: Word of mouse…at the heart of real growth is a simple idea: People decide to tell other people.

Andy Johns (Current VP of Growth at Wealthfront. Formerly growth at Facebook, Twitter, Quora. Ex-EIR Greylock) Real Engines Of Growth Have Nothing To Do With Growth Hacking | TechCrunchUnderstand where your success is coming from today and double down on what is already working. If these channels are working for you without any real effort on your part, then there are huge opportunities to expand on them.

David Sacks (CEO at Zenefits) New Sales Models – David Sacks, Founder and CEO of Yammer – YouTubeYou have to innovate on distribution, not just product. Do you have a viral strategy? Do you have a platform strategy? Do you have an embed strategy? At PayPal, we had a viral strategy for acquisition through email. We bootstrapped off the eBay platform, and we embedded PayPal logos on eBay auctions.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Winback Campaigns vs New Customer Acquisition – AVCAs mobile becomes a more difficult environment to grow in (maturing market, more competition, growing dominance of the leaders), we see companies spending more and more money on new customer acquisition. While that is necessary, it is not likely the most capital efficient way to grow. Winning back churned out users can be a lot more cost effective if done right.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Retention – AVCYou can email or spam in some other way your inactive users and that might work. But what you do once they come back is way more important. You have to figure out how to make the experience better than it was when they used it previously. Some of that will likely be that the product is much better because your and your team have improved it a lot. But some of that should be an engaging experience that somehow they did not get before.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) The Fallacy Of Zero Sum Game Thinking – AVCThe cool thing about these marketplaces is that the sellers (or project creators in Kickstarter’s case) are the primary marketing engine. Sellers bring the first time buyers. And then many of them stick around and transact again and again, often with sellers other than the one that brought them in the first place. It is a commons where everyone (or most everyone) benefits from the expansion of the marketplace.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Search Vs Social – AVCAt some point, I became convinced that websites would eventually see more acquisition traffic coming from social than they were seeing from search, which was the king dog of Internet traffic at the time. It was a hotly debated issue but, again maybe because of how long we were on Twitter, I was convinced social would be king some day. It’s kind of funny to think that we wondered and debated about such things back in 2008 and 2009. It’s not a deba… (read more)
”Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) OccupyAppStore – AVC“”We can’t figure out how to get on the leaderboards. The app stores aren’t working for us as a distribution channel.””
To which I replied “”All the app stores use a leaderboard model which makes the rich richer and everyone else poorer. We are in the 99%, wishing we were in the 1%.”””

Seth Godin (Founder at Yoyodyne Entertainment) Seth’s Blog: “Our biggest problem is awareness”If your startup, your non-profit or your event is suffering because of a lack of awareness, the solution isn’t to figure out some way to get more hype, more publicity or more traffic. …the solution lies in re-organizing your systems, in re-creating your product or service so that it becomes worth talking about…you can dramatically impact the ‘more awareness’ problem by investing heavily in a funnel that doesn’t leak, in a story that’s worth s… (read more)

Sam Altman (President at Y Combinator) Startup PlaybookAsk your [power user and really good] customers where you can find more people like them.

Rob Go (Co-Founder and Partner at NextView Ventures) Very Basic Startup Marketing – ROBGO.ORGThe best marketing is customer success. That’s why I think it’s incredibly important that the functions of product and marketing not be thought of as two silos. The job is not done when you’ve gotten someone to pay. It is done when you have delighted a customer to the point that they can’t help but tell others about you.

Rob Go (Co-Founder and Partner at NextView Ventures) Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing – ROBGO.ORGI’ve been on a bit of a quiet campaign to meet a bunch of really strong user-acquisition folks at different startups in Boston and New York. One thing that is surprising is that many of these people have limited marketing experience. What they do have is a highly analytical background and a mentality around experimentation. On the flip side, more experienced marketers often enter a startup setting wanting to employ an older playbook to stick to t… (read more)

Avrom Gilbert (COO Seeking Alpha) Israel’s Subscription ChallengeIt’s likely that at some point you will reach a point with your customer acquisition cost where it will be hard to improve it significantly. However, if you keep improving your product then your lifetime user value can keep growing indefinitely, which keeps growing your net lifetime user value. This in turn means that you can choose to increase profit or, more likely, spend more to take more market share (even at the risk of increasing your custo… (read more)

Tomasz Tunguz (Partner at Redpoint Ventures) How Customer Success Meaningfully Reduces Cost of Customer AcquisitionWhen discussing customer success for SaaS startups, the conversation focuses mostly on retaining customers and reducing churn. These are two fantastic benefits with meaningful return-on-investment. But great customer success organizations can meaningfully impact another critical part of the customer lifecycle, customer acquisition, by catalyzing evangelists to refer new customers.

Sam Altman (President at Y Combinator) Startup PlaybookIf you have a free product, don’t plan to grow by buying users. that’s really hard for ad-supported businesses. You need to make something people share with their friends.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) The Mobile Downturn (continued) – AVCSo if you want to launch a new consumer mobile app, what do you do? The best answer I have heard to that question came at breakfast yesterday with an entrepreneur. He said he plans to build mobile web experiences that can go viral and build adoption of his product and use that as a funnel to drive adoption, over time, to his native apps. I’ve seen that work.

Sachin Rekhi (Group Product Manager at LinkedIn) How to Find Your Ideal Customer | Sachin RekhiDetermine the most meaningful attributes by which you can segment and cluster your candidate customers. Some of the most common segmentation attributes include use case, role, demographics, firm characteristics, and psychographic

David Sacks (CEO at Zenefits) New Sales Models – David Sacks, Founder and CEO of Yammer – YouTubeI believe in the law of successful distribution arbitrage. Successsful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer unusally effective. That’s why this is such a tough problem. Overtime users get used to techniques and they become less effective. The same techniques that got LinkedIn or Facebook to millions of users would not work today.

Paul Graham (Co-Founder & Partner at Y Combinator) Default Alive or Default Dead?Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. In fact the large staffs of successful startups are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And partly because when founders have slow growth they don’t want to face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing enough.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Bootstrap Your Network With A High Value Niche Use Case – AVCSo if you want to build a peer to peer network, you have to find the use case that is high enough value that some people will do things (like put content into your application) that most people won’t. If you nail that, and win the hearts and minds and activity of that small high value user base, then you will have to opportunity to go mainstream. If you aim for the mainstream users first, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Fred Wilson (Co-Founder and Partner at Union Square Ventures) Mobile Web Is Top Of Funnel, Mobile App Is Bottom Of Funnel – AVCMobile web unique visitor growth is faster than mobile app visitor growth and the lines are diverging. This is because your mobile website is the top of the funnel for your user acquisition on mobile. It is where people land when coming from search, email, social media, text links, etc, etc.
The mobile web scales much better. You can build a large audience on mobile web much more easily than via mobile apps.